Back to school

At midnight last night it was our one week anniversary in Quito - yeaah, congrats to us and to you Quito, and we haven't even been mugged yet! :)

Being a couple can make travel really relaxing and easy-going. It can however mean it's harder to meet other people. We are staying in the Old Town, full of impressive colonial churches and steep cobbled streets. It is about an hour away from La Mariscal Sucre (dubbed 'gringolandia' by locals) - the main tourist centre of bars and hostels.

We have however met some lovely people at our Spanish school. Swiss, Swedish, British and American so far. There's a young American couple living here and planning to adopt a baby. The Swiss guy was here for the climbing - he told us altitude-induced horror stories that made us all want to get down and kiss the safe ground we were on.

Our best friend, by far though, here in Quito is Pedro. He hovers over the bushes and flowers outside our window every morning as we eat breakfast. It's pretty much a solid friendship. He usually turns up just as we are having our first sip of (weak and rubbish) breakfast tea. He is a tiny electric blue and green hummingbird.

Pedro looks just like this violet-bellied hummingbird. Thank you to Paul Pratt who I borrowed the image from and who has many other beautiful images of the Hummingbirds of Ecuador on his site:

http://www.netcore.ca/prairie/Pauls_Web_pages/Hummingbirds_of_Ecuador.html

Trying new fruit is also fun, and all the 'exotic' stuff you'd fork out a few quid for in Britain is obviously the cheap way to eat here, as it is native. The discovery of 'maracuyas' is my favourite find so far. They are giant passionfruits.

Breakfast fruit - bananas, pineapple, maracuyas and dulce tomates ('sweet tomatoes' that taste a bit like papaya). 

In India, Carla and I got addicted to eating fresh green-fleshed passionfruits that you could buy from street vendors. They were hacked in half and you could suck out the insides. They were much tastier fresh, than the purple-skinned passionfruits we get at home in Britain. Over shipping time, they grow old wrinkly skins and extortionate price tags. So the discovery of these fresh GIANT passionfruits that cost 50 cents for two, was pretty exciting.

We found a great Spanish school (Guayasamin Spanish School) directed by an Ecuadorian guy with a moustache called Luis. We are doing four hours intensive Spanish Monday-Friday with our teacher Kenia. It is fun but intense. We also get about an hour of 'la tarea' each night, aka homework. So it's pretty much like being back at school. Except with more of an urge to learn.

All ready for our first day of school. The 'Experto' bit turned out not to be true, but we're working on it.

Some pictures of our walk to school, through the Old Town to La Mariscal:

                                                                On our road

                                                Basilica del Voto Nacional

                                                    Most days we walk through El Ejido Park

                                                         Quito's Boris-bike equivalent

Walking back home again. If we ever get lost, all we do is look for the Virgin Mary. Literally, not spiritually. El Panecillo is the hill that stands behind us with the Virgin Mary on top.

I love old people!

I have changed continents, and so far, the above is what I have learnt.

Murry and I woke up at 5am in London on 1st September, and ended up in our rented apartment in Quito, Ecuador exactly 24 hours later.

Flying into Quito was exciting. It was 10pm so the night outside was dotted with those glittering white and yellow city lights that always look so inviting from the sky - a bit like a man-made attempt to recreate the stars up above. What made it really exciting though, was the contours. Quito is all hills. On the outskirts of the city, where the lights stopped, we could just about make out the dark looming triangles of volcanoes.

This morning we woke up to a view of Pichincha volcano outside our window. The hills above us, and below the volcano, were scattered with whitewashed houses. What is it about hills and mountains? I can't get enough of them.

  View from our bedroom window, Quito, Ecuador

 Then there's the steep ups and downs of the cobbled streets in The Old Town, where we are staying. When we arrived we had to crouch with our arms out ready to catch our bags, by the car boot, as the steep hill would have seen them tumble out the boot and straight down the hill. 

After a big wander around Quito's Old Town today, I can confirm that my other instant love in this city is the old people.

The old people here are amazing. I have gathered this much just by watching them, like some kind of creepy reverse paedophile. I think I have a fetish. I am already scheming some kind of 'grab a granny/ adopt a grandpa' plot. The old faces here are so weather-beaten and wonderfully wrinkled. Maps of lives and stories to be told. The grandmas look so kind and wise; really open faces and lots of toothless grins. Many of them have shrunk to tiny proportions, and oh my! Their feet! Old people in Ecuador have the smallest feet I have ever seen!! Their shoes are tiny.

My favourite grandma so far is an old lady I spied in The Plaza Grande who can't have been more than 3 feet tall. She was wearing a white dress and a big colourful woolly cardigan with slippers on her feet (tiny slippers of course). She was wandering around eating an ice-cream cone. That was it really. I didn't speak to her, I just fell a bit in love from a distance.

Murry sometimes gets annoyed when I say old people are cute. They are, after all, much older, wiser and more experienced than we are, so it's pretty patronising. But I mean cute in a lived, totalled, whole, shrunken again, and 'they-don't-give-a-shit' kind of way. They tend not to rush about like us younger folk, preoccupied with forwards and back, ups and downs, ego worries and life strains. They are sort of done with it and let go. Sometimes it seems people revert to a sort of childlike form in old age. Maybe we shed all of those other layers, keep the lessons we have learned and perhaps just learn to be a bit still with it all? 

Anyhow, still a bit jetlagged. I had a huge siesta earlier (could get used to this lifestyle).

Tomorrow we are going to look for a Spanish school to try and get our tongues rolling out the lingo. Then perhaps, once the language is on my side, I can start making my moves on some of the old folk...

All very wrong, I apologise. I really just mean have some innocent chatter with them.